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Music, Movies, & General Geekery: Life.by Christopher Grant Harris

Friday, 5 May 2017

HEY, GANG! Tomorrow (Saturday the 6th) is a very cool and rare happening: Fools Play Improv is occuring on MY BIRTHDAY! So, really, if you want to help me celebrate my birthday, you should come down to Olympia and watch me make an ass outta myself for an hour or two!

Thursday, 4 May 2017

Album of the Month:Lookout by Fine Prince
A fun an extremely-hard-to-categorize album, this poppy gem is full of great hooks, funny lyrics, and some very nice polish. It is really hard to describe Fine Prince’s music without using metaphor. This album is a warm summer breeze in the hours before dusk. There, howzat? They call it “sunshine pop” and I dig it. Seriously, listen to all of the things in these songs: overflowing buckets of harmony (male and female), cool synths (two keyboard players), sometimes a brass section, even a choir in “Nostalgia.” It’s all very charming and hard to resist. Buy it. Support these guys and gals so they can record more, ’cause I wanna hear it.

Artist Of the Month:
Felicia Chang, AKA Little Kumiho
Little Kumiho has a fashion-y animé style that I find very appealing. It also sometimes feels like what Mike Allred’s work would look like if he pushed just a little into the animé milieu. Bonus: She’s very local, so there’s actually a good chance I’ll meet her someday!

Video Game of the Month:
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
In an unprecedented move, I am making something an “Of the Month” for two months in a row. Why? Because I’m still playing this game two months after I got it. Almost every day. And it is still just as awesome as the first day. Just take a look at this:

Monday, 17 April 2017

Hahahahahahaha! Canada is putting out a new $10 bill to mark their 150th birthday. They made a snazzy new web page where you can do a 360-degree view of it (and see that, once again, it is like a million times prettier than any American money).

You can also do something else: if you enter the Konami code on that page, you get a fun li’l surprise. Be sure to have the volume up (but not a lot); there’s an auditory component.

If you don’t want to do it yourself, a couple of people have recorded it and put it on on the YouTubes. Like this one:

Wednesday, 12 April 2017

Just over two years after this song was first released on his A Special Episode Of EP, a very slick and hilarious music video has been released for Open Mike Eagle’s “Dark Comedy Late Show.” It features cameos from comedians Kurt Braunohler and Baron Vaughn (the latter of which will be providing the voice of Crow T. Robot in the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 series coming soon to Netflix). The video is about the inaugural episode of the fictional Dark Comedy Late Show with Mike Eagle that goes horribly awry because Mike just will not stop rapping. Take a look:

Baron Vaughn gets some very funny moments as the camera cuts to his face displaying a gamut of emotions from horrified to embarrassed.

Yeah, we’ve all been there, Baron.

There is also a nice cameo by Mike Eagle’s compatriot Busdriver as a member of the Late Show band (which of course also gets interrupted by Mike’s incessant rapping). He plays some sort of little keyboard/sampler thing!

Get on the bus!

I’m not sure who the two women in the band are, but the woman playing guitar does look familiar. The video’s IMDB page doesn’t have a credit for a singer/guitarist, though weirdly it does have one for a Kimberlee Redman as keybordist (and a guy named Victor Holmes as a musician???). Anybody help me out with them?

Anyhoo, this super-professional video was released on the JASH YouTube channel. JASH is (in their own words)

Founded and featuring original content by partners Sarah Silverman, Michael Cera, Tim and Eric, and Reggie Watts, JASH is the first fully realized network to offer all its comedic partners complete creative autonomy. At Jash we always strive to offer a variety of content with a unique voice: boundaries will be pushed, and disorientation is sure to ensue.

Tuesday, 11 April 2017

Even though this band has apparently been around for three years, I only just heard about them this last weekend. The Cybertronic Spree is a group that dresses up in astonishingly-accurate Transformers costumes and plays the songs from the Transformers: The Movie Soundtrack. Take a look:

HOTROD, ARCEE, RUMBLE, UNICRON, SPIKE, SOUNDWAVE, BUMBLEBEE, AND A QUINTESSON HAVE BEEN BROUGHT TOGETHER BY THE POWER OF ROCK. TOGETHER, THEY ARE THE CYBERTRONIC SPREE.

Not only are the costumes astonishingly accurate, but they’re built in such a way that the band members are still able to effectively play all their instruments! It’s a pretty remarkable achievement. Except for the guy dressed up as Spike, that’s an easy costume.

They also pepper their act with non-Transformers songs, and they have a couple of excellent choices, like this super-obscure theme song to the 80s Droids cartoon, which was about the adventures of C-3PO and R2-D2 before Episode IV.

Oddly enough, I can’t find any record of them playing Weird Al’s “Dare to be Stupid” song, which was on the Trasnformers: The Movie Soundtrack. I’m not sure why, maybe there’s a different rights issue involved?

Tuesday, 4 April 2017

I noticed late last week that my website traffic was blowin’ up. Take a look here:

March 30th: Daaaaaaaaaaang.

Looking into it, I realized that 99% off that traffic was from my post about Open Mike Eagle declaring himself the new Mayor of Ferndale, WA. I was already aware that Mike had re-tweeted the link to the article, but I quickly discovered that it hadn’t stopped there.

Mello Music Group (who have released some OME musics) tweeted a link to my post as well: